July 5, 2007

4th of July Thoughts

Cat thoughts.......
Going through my family myths, I realize this nation is doomed. Not because of Iraq and certainly not because of who is president. The thing that dooms the nation is who settled it. Why did the original settlers come to the U.S? Was it greed? Was it desperation? Were they thrown out of their country of origin? What makes someone leave what they have known all their lives to come into the wilderness? Take my own family as an example. People who got here in the beginning were either aristocrats or were escaping from danger. Some of us came from Scotland where we were kicked out for backing the wrong revolution, some of us came because the land ran out in the home country, and some of us stowed away on ships. None of us came because we thought "Gee, let's conquer the new world." Raise your hands if this sounds at all like a recipe for a dysfunctional nation. People who come to a nation -- under duress, under funded, under protected, under siege -- are not people who always play well with others. More than likely, they run with scissors! Granted, the founding fathers were exceptional. But my contention is that they would be exceptional no matter where they were born. It was our country's luck that they were born when and where and close enough in the time line to actually make a difference. If Washington had been alone in his fight would he have survived? Would Franklin alone have made a difference? Tom Paine? George Mason? James Madison? Hutchinson? Jefferson? No. It took all of the founding fathers and THEN all the others (from the soldiers to the delegates in Philadelphia to the Virginia assembly, to the fake Massachusetts Indians of the infamous Boston Tea Party) to make it happen. All of them. Without all of them, we would never have been able to pull this nation together. We are too fragmented politically and socially in the country to unite behind anyone person and none of the front runners will combine with others to work towards the common good. Did politicians after the Revolution ever combine for the common good? Probably not. Bottom line politics means every candidate for himself. Like I said earlier, we are doomed.

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